An anglophile on the cultural prowl

January 01, 2010

I'm a big fan of Louise Penny, a Canadian author whose Three Pines books is about as lovely as a murder mystery series is going to get. In her most recent newsletter, Penny linked to a blog called Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, written by Sarah Weinman, an LA Times crime fiction reviewer. Weinman offered a great list of the best crime fiction of the decade, which includes Penny's Still Life as well as a number of other books I've been meaning to read, like the Stieg Larsson trilogy, Daniel Woodrell's Winter Bone (also recommended by The Oregonian's Steve Duin), Arnaldur Indridason's Jar City and Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, as well as a few books I've never heard of.

She also reviews some intriguing books in the sidebar, such as Through the Heart by Kate Morganroth who "tells the fairy-tale minded to take their fantasies and shove it" and Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth, who offers "one of the most definitive fictional accounts of London just as it was about to swing." I'm definitely looking forward to reading this blog further.

December 30, 2009

The Book Design Review has offered up their top book designs of the year, which you can even vote on on their website. The front runner, and my favorite, is Columbine, which has a desolate, 28 Days Later feel and gives off an austere, unsentimental, Scandinavian vibe.

At the same time, due to its light color scheme and its abundance of sky, there's something dimly hopeful about the cover to me. There's an ambiguity that tells me this is not going to be an ordinary, sentimental true-crime book, and when you stop to think about the subject matter, that's no small feat on the part of its designer, Henry Sene Yee. If the many stellar reviews it has garnered are correct, this is one book you can judge from its cover.

September 27, 2009

Below are some excerpts from The Nation's review (via the Powell's blog) of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, who was a Brazilian writer who died in 1977. They make her work sound difficult, but after reading some of this, I'm eager to try her.

Lispector was fascinated by the possibility of extinguishing self-consciousness; she idealized animals and idiots because they were free of the desire to translate their experiences into words.

Lispector is most "mystical" when she describes her longing for silence and her belief that she could never express in words what she called her "truest life." She was obsessed by the inaccuracy and dullness of language: it dooms us to become common, to repeat what others have already said.

She said the word "literature" made her "bristle like a cat," and she wasn't concerned about whether she was following or abandoning a literary tradition. Still, she shared with contemporaries like Woolf a suspicion of language, a sense of deep alienation and a fear of madness that led to heightened self-consciousness.

Wasafiri, a literary magazine I've never heard of, asked 25 "acclaimed international writers", most of whom I've never heard of, to name which book they thought most shaped world literature over the last 25 years. My ignorance of these writers probably speaks to the insularity of American writers/readers that Nobel Prize official Horace Engdahl was referring to in his comments last year, but I look at this list and think it could just as easily be titled, "Authors I Only Read Because I Feel I Have To."

Toni Morrison? I couldn't wait for Beloved to end. Roberto Bolano? I just gave up on reading The Savage Detectives after it took me about three weeks to get through the first 165pp and deciding I hated every single character and couldn't take it anymore. 100 Years of Solitude? Interesting and occasionally beautiful, but I just never felt like I could relate to it at all. You get the idea.

I'm not saying these books aren't brilliant, but must so many 'important' books be so... unpleasurable? Maybe it's just me, but I was very happy to see fellow nominees Lolita and The English Patient, two books that also have pretty weighty subject matter, but still manage to be engaging and compelling.

September 25, 2009

In some ways, it's easy to love Miranda July's work. Her portraits of lonely people speak to the outsider in all of us. Some of her characters in No One Belongs Here More Than You, for example, broke my heart. But there's also something uncomfortable about her work, something creepy and alarming that comes as a shock. (In her book, you start off thinking that her characters are the Jane Adams character in the movie Little Children, but sometimes they end up feeling a little closer to the Jackie Earle Haley character instead.) July's series of photos for Vice magazine, in which she calls out the extras in old movie scenes, conjure up the same intriguing, unsettling feelings.

The older I get, the more I appreciate this kind of unpredictability. It's the same thing I love about the TBA Festival. I have an idea of what the terrain is going to be, but I have no idea where I'm going to end up. The journey will hold the kind of intellectual surprise that seems like a real rarity for me these days.

I was thinking something along these lines while listening to Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome" recently. Where have the Public Enemies of the world gone? When is the last time a band stood up for something in such a direct and formidable way and demanded to be heard? When is the last time a band felt really, truly threatening to the status quo... and made great songs, too?

Leonard Pitts, who's probably my favorite op-ed columnist, wrote an interesting piece about the lack of authentic rebellion in music recently. He wrote: "Popular culture is increasingly home to artificial outlaws and fake rebels, revolution on the cheap that looks like the real thing unless you look too close."

I know there are plenty of bands out there now who are making political music, but why haven't any of them acquired as large a following as Public Enemy? Is it because they're not being picked up or promoted by increasingly conservative record companies? Or is it because there are so many bands one can choose to listen to now (via web and filesharing) that their impact is diluted? Is it because we, the audience, don't want to be challenged or made uncomfortable? Or is it because record companies don't think we do? Or something else?